1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus for processing an audio signal and method thereof Although the present invention is suitable for a wide scope of applications, it is particularly suitable for encoding or decoding audio signals.
2. Discussion of the Related Art
Generally, an audio characteristic based coding scheme is applied to such an audio signal as a music signal and a speech characteristic based coding scheme is applied to a speech signal.
However, if one prescribed coding scheme is applied to a signal in which an audio characteristic and a speech characteristic are mixed with each other, audio coding efficiency is lowered or a sound quality is degraded.